Fergus Cassidy

Major call

Judging by the amount of seagulls rummaging through the plastic bin bags, it was at least four in the morning and this was the last thing I expected to see. A little the worse for wear, I walked on by. If only to check my sanity, I turned to have another look.

There they were. At least 30 people had formed an orderly queue and were chattering away excitedly. Someone had stumbled across a malfunctioning public telephone box where calls to any country in the world could be made for the price of a local one. In those times of high emigration, Irish people were scattered around the globe and a broken telephone box was an oasis. For as long as it lasted.

Public telephone boxes may have been put to all sorts of uses back then but their presence on street corners, towns and villages was extremely important. Life-saving. Not everyone could afford private telephones and the concept of Universal Service Obligation was born (USO).

The EU defines universal service: "A fundamental requirement is to provide users on request with a connection to the public telephone network at a fixed location, at an affordable price".

The USO largely succeeded in allowing access to the telephone network to far more of the population than would otherwise have happened. The issues of affordability and cost of provision were as much a pot-boiler then as now. Hence the dawn queue for those long distance calls.

With mobiles now roaming the land, public telephone boxes are on the endangered species list but is universal service also heading for extinction?

Not quite. But bringing it up to date and getting it to reflect these changed times will be as difficult, if not more so, than when it was introduced in the first place. Where once universal service only dealt with using the telephone network for voice, the fusion of the internet and telecommunications is heralding a future where so much more can be sent down the telephone lines.

Within the next decade the vast bulk of traffic on the telephone network will be moving to internet protocol. British Telecom has marked 2009 as the deadline for switching its entire telephone network to internet protocol. The distinguishing line between voice and data is disappearing fast.

So in any decisions about the future of universal service, it has to make sense to include internet access, seeing as that is where this is all heading.

And I'm pleased that the EU has taken internet access into account in its directives but very unhappy that it is left as vague as a long-term weather forecast.

The EU directive, which Ireland signed last year, contains a double-dose of definitions that just beg even bigger questions.

Firstly, there's this: "Connections to the public telephone network at a fixed location should be capable of supporting speech and data communications at rates sufficient [my emphasis] for access to online services...".

Further on, the directive mentions the possibility of a telephone line being "insufficient to support satisfactory [again my emphasis] Internet access".

So when it comes to modernising universal service there is agreement in policy that internet access should be included. The problem being that 'sufficient' and 'satisfactory' are about as useful as a six euro note.

This shyness to define internet access is reflected again in the directive where it refers to the quality and speed of net access: "... it is not appropriate to mandate a specific data or bit rate at Community level".

So what we've got to work with is that internet access is part of the new universal service but defining the quality of that access is in the lap of the gods. If applied to the original universal service scheme decades ago it would have been: 'you can have a telephone box but you can't always make calls'.

The modernising of universal service in Ireland is going to a lot more tricky because of the timidity of the European mandarins. Yet soon enough, this country is going to have to bite the bullet on universal service.

The gap to be bridged is enormous. On the one hand there's the much-touted 'knowledge society' as the key economic propellant. On the other, though, is how much it's going to cost to make that a reality.

The great danger is that we're going to get a type of universal service that is based on what can be afforded and not on what is necessary for social and economic well-being.

We'll hear the familiar refrain of cost being put forward similiar to when universal health care or education were first proposed. What was the cost of universal suffrage?

The right thing to do is to decide what universal service means first and foremost and only then move on to the issue of obligation and costs. Define internet access speeds and entitlements on the basis of what is required for the future, not by what is achieveable or acceptable to 'market forces'.

Universal service should still mean access for all to affordable communications. Any other outcome is something we can't afford right now.